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The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, more commonly known as Tower of Terror, is a theme park ride erected at the Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, Florida in 1994 and at Disney's California Adventure in Anaheim, California in 2004. It is based upon the television show "The Twilight Zone".
As part of the Happiest Homecoming on Earth celebration, two more towers will open at Tokyo Disneysea in Japan (2005) and at Walt Disney Studios in France (2008).
Imagineer concept art for the Tokyo Disneysea Tower of Terror. The ride is themed to resemble the fictional Hollywood Tower Hotel of 1939. The storyline of the ride is that in 1939, the occupants of an elevator at the hotel were struck by a strange force and transported to the Twilight Zone.
Guests entering the ride are ushered into the library, in which they view a short television film hosted by Rod Serling which sets up the show to come. From there, guests pass through what appears to be the basement boiler room, and into a sit down elevator. In the Florida version of Tower of Terror, the elevator rises, and the doors open to reveal a corridor with the 1939 ghostly occupants, who then disappear. The corridor fades to black with starlit sky, and a window cracks. The elevator doors close, and it rises again. At the top, the doors open, and the elevator mysteriously moves forward out of the shaft, past strange ghostly objects.
At the end of the forward motion, the chamber is darkened, and the elevator rises and falls rapidly, taking riders through a series of thrills, after which they finally descend to the bottom.
Previous versions of the ride had the same sequence of falls each time, but the current version has been randomized with five different possible patterns.
The ride employs elevator technology developed specifically for Disney, particularly the ability to move the cab forward. To enhance the dropping effects, the elevator is accelerated downward faster than the pull of gravity.
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